why introducing hidden directories in /etc

[Omair Majid]

Hi,

On 12/03/2011 07:02 AM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> why are permanently with updates introduced new hidden folders
> in /etc which let alerting "rkhunter"? openjdk is only a recent
> example, but happended often in the last years with several packages
>
> [harry at srv-rhsoft:~]$ ls -lha /etc/.java/
> insgesamt 20K
> drwxr-xr-x    3 root root 4,0K 2011-12-01 16:20 .
> drwxr-xr-x. 144 root root  12K 2011-12-02 20:14 ..
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root root 4,0K 2011-11-28 20:21 .systemPrefs
>
> ---------------------- Start Rootkit Hunter Scan ----------------------
> Warning: Hidden directory found: /etc/.java
>

For openjdk, I added this 'fix' to address bug 741821 [1]. You can look 
at the bug for details, but essentially this is just making explicit 
what the software was expecting (or using) all along.

You are right that the hidden directories are a bad idea, but this is 
what the code in openjdk6 uses and we are (sort of) stuck with this - 
mostly because of backwards compatibility. Going forwards, I agree that 
we should fix this properly by using non-hidden directories, but this 
would probably be done only in the openjdk8 time frame.

Cheers,
Omair

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=741821